Looking for a self hosted diary type of service. Where I can login and write small topics, ideas, tag them and date them. No need for public access.

Any recommendations?

Edit: anybody using monicahq or has experience with it?

Clarification: indeed I could use a general note taking app for this task. I already host and use silverbullet for general notes and such. I am looking at something more focused on daily events and connections. Like noting people met, sport activities and feedbacks, names, places… So tagging and date would be central, but as well as connections to calendar and contacts, and who knows what else… So I want to explore existing more advanced, more specialized apps.

Edit2: I ended up with BookStack. MonicaHQ seems very nice but proved unable to install using containers. It would not obey APP_URL properly and would mess up constantly HTTP / HTTPS redirection. Community was unrepsonsive and apparently github issues are ignore lately. So i ditched MonicaHQ and switched to BookStack: installed in a breeze (again container) and a very simple NGINX setup just worked. I will be testing it out now.

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      I find Joplin cluncky and kinda slow. Also, it’s storage is not plain MD even if the files are called .md

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      Looks very promising, but its not self hosted? Looks more like an app / local webapp?

      • Norgur@kbin.social
        4·
        7 months ago

        it’s a bunch of loose files, basically. If you wanted it actively hosted, you’d just need to put them into a web server, basically.

      • AbidanYre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        7 months ago

        The “no public access” made me think a local option would suffice.

        There’s noteself as a self hosted version.

        I used it for a while but ended up moving to Joplin to be able to share notes with family. Noteself/Tiddly seemed like a better fit for your described use case though.

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      24·
      7 months ago

      Not really what I call open source. Long topic, not OT to discuss here…

  • Alabaster_Mango@lemmy.caEnglish
    32·
    7 months ago

    Would Obsidian work for you? The notes are stored locally, and the software uses markup for formatting and stuff. You can get it synced to your phone with Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.

    • overload@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      I think there’s an obsidian extension that allows you to basically save the notes in a github repository, making it cloud based kind of.

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      Not really, I am not looking to a note taking app but a diary kind of app, quite different use case. Similar, but different feature set.

      • MiltownClowns@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        I picked up obsidian because it is a perfect diary app w/ templates and daily notes built in. But it’s so damn customizable that my obsidian notebook has become an all consuming passion of knowledge base and personal project managment that requires me to be productive IRL to generate more content for me to catalogue. Really appeals to the data hoarder in me, been a game changer. Highly recommend. Perfect 5/7.

        Obsidian.rocks

      • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
        2·
        7 months ago

        Obsidian can be almost anything you want it to be. Try searching out some videos from folks who use Obsidian for journalling.

      • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        A note taking app can be turned into a diary app if you only create notes for each day.
        Even better if you want to then expand a section of a diary entry without actually modifying it nor jumping between apps.

        Obsidian can easily help you tag and link each note and theme/topic in each of them.
        There are several plugins for creating daily notes which will be your diary entries.
        Also it’s local only, you can pair it with any sync service, the obsidian provided one, git, any cloud storage, or ones which work directly with the files like syncthing.

        Just curious, what are the special features you expect from a diary service/app which a note taking one doesn’t have?

  • cmeu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    7 months ago

    If it isn’t meant for others to see, what’s wrong with a .txt file you just add notes to?

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      8·
      7 months ago

      Organization, sorting, categorization… Indeed a TXT can do the job, but why limiting to that…

      I already use silverbullet for general notes… But looking for something more targeted and specifically meant for diary tasks.

    • Shimitar@feddit.itOPEnglish
      21·
      7 months ago

      Tried the demo, nice, but still mostly a note taking app. Seems easy to selfhost

      • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        I’d like to add to the voice about Memo. It’s very nice, stable, loads of features if you want them and actively growing.

        I think of my “diary” as a stream of consciousness. Thus Memo makes sense. It feels like a personal Twitter feed.

        Tagging, photo upload, links. All that works great in Memo.

  • rem26_art@fedia.io
    23·
    7 months ago

    Maybe not be exactly what you’re looking for, but Logseq has a daily note-taking function. When you open it for the first time of the day, it shows you a blank journal with the current date as the header and you can put whatever you want in it. It has a search function that can search through all the notes you’ve made for specific text. It saves each day as a separate markdown file and you can sync these to your phone or other devices with Syncthing, a cloud service like Google Drive, or with git if you host something like Forgejo.

    The only thing about Logseq is that it doesn’t use the standard syntax for Markdown checkboxes. Instead, it has it’s own Todo syntax, which is perfectly human readable without Logseq, but loses out of some convenience if you were to migrate to something else.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      +1 for Logseq… I’m using it for work as well as personal stuff and it’s strength is automatically creating new pages (and reverse links back) by just typing ‘’ [[that new idea]] ‘’ and you’re done. Fantastic.

      And sync with syncthing

  • whoareu@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    I personally use private github repo as my diary. I don’t want to lose my data by accident. I trust github more than I trust myself